Alcor Life Extension Foundation
by Haberdashing
Summary: Transcendence AU one-shot (transcendence-au on tumblr). The Alcor Life Extension Foundation is alerted to the fact that they are no longer the only thing going by the name Alcor.


Sabrina's eyes started to glaze over as she skimmed through the Alcor Life Extension Foundation company e-mails. Spam, spam, spam… Man, they really needed to get better spam filters. And who fell for those spam messages in this day and age, anyway? Were there really still people out there who were ignorant enough to blindly trust that somebody who e-mailed them out of the blue could help enlarge their penis or set them up on a hot date? Or were spammers so dedicated to their cause that they never considered spending their time and effort in a more productive way?

After deleting a dozen e-mails without opening them, the woman hesitated, her cursor hovering over another one. _PLEASE HELP ME ALCOR! _read the subject line.

On the one hand, that subject line read along the lines of several e-mails that she had already deleted just a few moments earlier… but on the other hand, the e-mail lacked other markers of a typical spam e-mail. There was no attachment that threatened to be a virus in disguise, the sender's e-mail address was not some grotesquely misspelled version of a real company's name or a jumble of random words vaguely related to the e-mail's subject but instead the surprisingly normal (if unprofessional) "yankeepixie", and it even mentioned the company name in the header.

After some deliberation, curiosity got the better of her. Sabrina opened the e-mail.

The e-mail's contents only served to further increase the mystery behind the message's arrival.

_Please please PLEASE help me Alcor! I have leukemia and the doctors say I only have a few months longer to live and I don't want to die I'm only 13! Please make a deal with me, I'll give you anything you want, just DON'T LET ME DIE! T_T_

Sabrina sighed. The e-mail might not have been spam, but given how little sense it made and how irrelevant it appeared to be for the company, it might as well have been. Still, she figured it couldn't hurt to send a reply message.

_Dear YankeePixie,_

_Thank you for your message. Unfortunately, Alcor Life Extension Foundation is unable to accept minors as members at this time. I apologize for the inconvenience._

_Sincerely,_

_Sabrina Rivera_

_Front Office Administrator_

_Alcor Life Extension Foundation_

She sent the e-mail off, and her mind soon drifted towards other things… until, a few hours later, the next e-mail came.

This one was entitled _Alcor please help my husband_:

_Alcor,_

_My husband and I were recently in a car accident, and while I escaped with only a broken leg, he's been in and out of a coma since. Please, if there's any way you could extend his life, even by just a few more months, I would be incredibly grateful. Our daughter's wedding is in six weeks, and I know we would all be heartbroken if he passed away before then! Whatever the cost, I know it would be worth it._

_-Tamara_

Even then, Sabrina didn't quite make the connection. It sounded like somebody had just gotten the meaning of "life extension" confused again. Didn't anybody read the FAQ these days? Seriously, people were getting dumber and lazier by the day…

Over the next few weeks, the front office received an ever-increasing number of messages, letters soon becoming almost as numerous as the e-mails, all from people who asked not about future cryogenic freezing but about having longer lifespans right now. The woman soon realized that something was wrong, but she first assumed it was some misstep in their latest marketing campaign, something that she would have to bring up to Carl when he came back from his vacation to Aruba. Sabrina began to treat the messages as spam when she was able to identify them right off the bat, because they provided equally nonexistent value to their company, but it was harder to identify the letters at a glance, so she still had to open each and every one just in case this one contained an actual inquiry.

It was the letters, therefore, that tipped her off to the actual problem.

Few of them had used the full title of their organization, "Alcor Life Extension Foundation", when addressing them, but Sabrina had initially assumed that their being referred to as simply "Alcor" was just a misguided attempt at familiarity. But then other messages, far from using the organization's proper name, referenced what sounded like a different entity altogether.

Alcor the demon. Alcor the Dreambender.

On a whim, the woman decided to Google the name "Alcor", to see whether she could find the source of the odd messages that way.

Sabrina smiled as she saw that the front page of the website for their organization still topped the list of the Google search results. A couple of others referenced the organization, while the Wikipedia page for the star which was the foundation's namesake remained in the top ten. (The star Alcor was supposedly "a test for clear vision", as the foundation's mission page phrased it, though the woman sometimes wondered if its other moniker of "the forgotten one" wasn't more appropriate given how the media had been overlooking their work in the years since the Transcendence.) But in between… there were several demonology pages referencing an entirely different Alcor. An Alcor who was a demon, an Alcor who called himself Alcor the Dreambender.

Sabrina's heart raced as she read through the information about this other, new Alcor and realized who the strange messages had been meant to reach all along. She began printing out page after page, her usual concern about Paul's lambasting her for using up too much of the company's paper and ink now far from her mind, gathering them up together and stuffing them into a dirty black binder that had been gathering dust in the corner of Sabrina's desk ever since she could remember. She ran across the building, clutching the binder to her chest as if it were her child, and banged on the door of the foundation president's office, barely noticing the white flecks of paint that fell off with every hit.

The door slowly squeezed open, revealing a rotund figure in a brown business suit.

"Sabrina, what's going on?"

The woman thrust the binder into the president's hands. "This. This is what's going on."

The man sat back in his plush chair while Sabrina remained standing, absentmindedly tapping out a pattern with her foot. With every page he flipped, his face grew paler and paler, and by the time he shut the binder again, he resembled a caricature of a ghost more than a living, breathing human being.

"Oh my." He breathed.

"So. Max. What should we do about this?"

The two locked eyes. "Well, since you discovered… all this, I suppose you might have some ideas for me."

Sabrina broke into a thin, nervous smile. "Actually, yes. As I see it, you have three main options here."

The president waved his hand around lazily. "Go on."

The woman held up one finger. "The first option is, we pretend like we never noticed this and go on as we have been. Dealing with all those messages might be frustrating, but it'd certainly be the easiest and most straightforward option for us to implement."

He cleared his throat. "Right, right."

She held up a second finger. "The second option is, we change our company name to something else, something that avoids us being associated with this new demon figure. I know that would require a lot of work on our part, and it might lead to some confusion among members and non-members alike, but it might be the only way of establishing ourselves as separate from this other Alcor for good."

The president nodded slightly. "I understand. It's certainly a lot to think about. But then… what, pray tell, is the third option?"

Sabrina held up another finger, and her foot tapping grew louder and faster. "The third option is…" The woman silenced her foot and flashed the president a wide, though still thin, smile. "We find this demon who calls himself Alcor, and we make ourselves a deal."


End file.
